Image courtesy of impawards.com
The Film : Swingers
Notable Cast Members: Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn, Ron Livingston, Heather Graham
DVD available on Amazon.com here
Film Synopsis :
Dealing with love and dating is something that has become one of the backbones of Hollywood movie-making. Epic love stories and romantic comedies are one of the backbones of film-making. Traditional love stories are one thing, but what about the ordeals of dating? That’s for independent film-makers, it seems, and before he cracked it big Vince Vaughn was earning his acting stripes by becoming kind of the American independent cinema.
Vaughn stars as Trent, the smooth-talking man teaching his friend Mike (Favreau) the unwritten rules of dating in L.A. Mike and Trent are struggling actors as are their group of friends include Charles (Alex Desert), local tough guy Sue (Patrick Van Horn), named after the Johnny Cash song, and Rob (Ron Livingston), Mike’s friend from New York. Trying to make it occupies their daytime but they all seem to come alive cruising the Hollywood nightlife. Trent and Sue don’t seem to have a problem meeting women, of course, but Mike does. It’s not really a problem of meeting them, per se, it’s a matter of not completely scaring them away. Mike is still hung up on his girlfriend form back East, and this hang-up leads to several humorous interactions with several women.
Swingers succeeds because the film is the rare film that looks at love & dating in a realistic way as opposed to the usual romanticized notion of dating. Mike, Trent, Sue, Rob and Charles are throwbacks to an era of film-making where a man could just want sex from a woman and he wasn’t the bad guy in a romantic comedy. Trent and Sue are good guys and womanizers but they’re not villains. They have some priceless interactions with one another on the topics of women, sex, money and working. The cast and crew have a lot of chemistry with one another as well, as they were all friends off screen and it translates to their interactions on it. The film is written well enough so that we can sympathize with the guys, which normally isn’t the case when it comes to love and dating in the movies.
The star of the film, though, is Vaughn. While he’s become a major star since Swingers, this might be his best performance as a comic actor. Trent is a wildly charismatic guy speaking in his own language like a character out of Clockwork Orange; Vaughn is charismatic in the role and wildly entertaining as well. It would be the role that would land him in the sequel to Jurassic Park, which would be his big break and launch his ascent to being one of the funniest actors in Hollywood.
The film also lovingly takes scenes from other films and is upfront about it. The gang, who are Liman’s interpretation of the original Rat Pack (Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop), talk about great movies and sequences like the walking scene from Reservoir Dogs & the steady-cam shot from Goodfellas and then lovingly pay tribute them in shot for shot recreations. It’s definitely tongue in cheek and an amusing look at dating.
The Story Behind It :
At 18 I was a college freshman at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. I was a bit wayward, trying to find some sort of path, and a friend of mine from high school and I reconnected in college. I hung out with him and his friends, and one of them was a guy named Rob. Well, now it’s Captain Neiderman as Rob was in Army ROTC and somehow managed to become an officer. Rob was a real nice and real bright guy, but nothing about him really screamed “Military commander” to me. To be fair I did two years in ROTC myself and it wasn’t a great combination, either, but Rob seemed a bit too much like an accountant to wind up as a Field Artillery commander (which he’s doing now).
One thing Rob did that I’m forever grateful for was introduce me to Vince Vaughn movies. He always seemed to be on a different path in terms of pop culture and whatnot, always being able to find something wonderful that no one else had found. He was the lone guy who listened to the Talking Heads and other bands form that genre and time when no one else did. Rob had that sort of inner cool and own definitive spirit that’s pretty hard to find, especially on a college campus.
Rob talked about Swingers after discovering it at some art-house theatre in Chicago the summer before. When you’re a suburbanite like Rob, I and my friend Jim are any film you can see in the city and not the suburbs has some value to it at first, especially if you’re young. When you’re a teenager through your early 20s the City of Chicago seems like a great place to live, especially if you’ve lived in the suburbs. So when Rob suggested this great movie he saw in Chicago, it’s almost if it was divine revelation to go see it.
Well I went and rented it on VHS that weekend; this was still the era before the power of DVD and before you could find movies on the web, so going to “Video Explosion” or the theatre were your only options. So I trucked over, rented it, and the rest is viewing history. It’s still a quality film after repeated viewings, multiple DVD purchases and countless imitation by those who I’ve turned on to it.
